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The comedy duo of Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong — aka Cheech and Chong — had a great run in the 1970s and early ‘80s. They made successful films (“Up in Smoke”), claimed a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album (“Los Cochinos”) and won fans throughout the country for their counter-culture outlook that, in the end, always centered on the recreational consumption of a leafy plant known by various names — cannabis, pot, grass, marijuana.

That run ended in the mid-1980s when the duo broke up.

“If you took any writing class they’ll tell you, ‘Conflict, conflict, conflict.’ With Cheech and Chong it basically boils down to the same thing,” Chong said in a phone conversation last week as he sat in the sun outside a restaurant in Santa Monica, Calif.

“(Marin) felt he could do better on his own and he did it, and it really forced me to become a standup comedian. It also gave me a chance to get my wife working for me. In the end it worked out.”

The duo got back together in 2008, and brings its act to Burlington for a show Saturday. Cheech and Chong will be joined by Chong’s wife, Shelby, for the performance at Memorial Auditorium.

They’re fully aware that they’ll be coming to Burlington the day after April 20, which has become something of a holiday for pot-smokers everywhere.

“For all the ones that missed 4/20 we’re going to have a 4/21,” Chong said, adding that the day-after performance is for those stoners who overslept or thought the big day was May 20, not April 20.

The reunion of Cheech and Chong was pushed along by Chong’s son and manager, Paris.

“It was an accident, basically,” Chong said. “Cheech and I got together and we had a fight — I hadn’t seen him for 20 years or longer. When I got home I emailed him and said, ‘Even though we didn’t get along it was sure nice seeing you.’” Chong said his son intercepted the email and forged one from his father saying Cheech and Chong should go out on tour. Marin responded positively, according to Chong, and the reunion was born.

“There was a clash of egos,” Chong said, “but my son figured that out” by cutting through the duo’s animosity toward one another.

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He appreciates the novelty of their reunification.

“No comedy team in history had ever broken up and come back together again that I know of,” he said. “Martin and Lewis never did. The Three Stooges, they died. We came to a point in our career where (Marin) was ready to do Cheech and Chong again, and I was always ready.”

Chong, 73, has dubbed the performance they’ll stage in Burlington this weekend the “iconic show. I call it the ‘iconic show’ because we are icons and so many people come to look at us like in a museum.”

Shelby Chong will open with “about 20 minutes of stoner comedy,” according to her husband, followed by a few bits he and Marin haven’t done on stage before. “Then we go into a Simon and Garfunkel mode and sing the songs we sang for all the movies and go into a sort of music concert,” Chong said.

Marin has bad eyes, according to Chong, whose hearing isn’t what it used to be; he said they’ve considered doing a project called “Grumpy Old Stoners.” At his AARP-friendly age, Chong said his only real plan for the future is to start wearing his pants high.

“As you get older you plan to get shorter,” he said, adding that he has no plans to retire other than to spend more time on the golf course. “I’ve been retired my whole life. I’ve never really had a steady job. Every now and then we go to a place like your place and have a holiday.”

In the four decades since Cheech and Chong first broke into the mainstream, Chong — who spent time in jail in 2003-04 for distributing drug paraphernalia — said they have seen a fair amount of change in public perceptions toward marijuana use, especially with states legalizing the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes.

“Everybody agrees that the war on drugs has failed,” according to Chong. “Everyone will have a different reason why it has failed, but the truth is the war on drugs has failed miserably. The war on pot should never have happened because pot has proved to be an effective medicine. So what’s happening is kind of like everybody’s catching up to Cheech and Chong. We always knew this. I had to go to jail for nine months for my beliefs and my bong company. But we’re being vindicated.”

He’ll take that vindication even if it took 40 years. “In stoner time,” Chong said, “that’s like two days.”